Producing Canadian Literature

Kit Dobson, Smaro Kamboureli

Description

Producing Canadian Literature: Authors Speak on the Literary Marketplace brings to light the relationship between writers in Canada and the marketplace within which their work circulates. Through a series of conversations with both established and younger writers from across the country, Kit Dobson and Smaro Kamboureli investigate how writers perceive their relationship to the cultural economy—and what that economy means for their creative processes.

The interviews in Producing Canadian Literature focus, in particular, on how writers interact with the cultural institutions and bodies that surround them. Conversations pursue the impacts of arts funding on writers; show how agents, editors, and publishers affect writers’ works; examine the process of actually selling a book, both in Canada and abroad; and contemplate what literary awards mean to writers. Dialogues with Christian Bök, George Elliott Clarke, Daniel Heath Justice, Larissa Lai, Stephen Henighan, Roy Miki, Erín Moure, Ashok Mathur, Lee Maracle, Jane Urquhart, and Aritha van Herk testify to the broad range of experience that writers in Canada have when it comes to the conditions in which their work is produced.

Original in its desire to directly explore the specific circumstances in which writers work—and how those conditions affect their writing itself—Producing Canadian Literature will be of interest to scholars, students, aspiring writers, and readers who have followed these authors and want to know more about how their books come into being.

Sujets

• Cultural Studies

Informations

• Publié par: Wilfrid Laurier University Press
• Date de parution: 15 juin 2013
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781554586400
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

Producing Canadian Literature
TransCanada Series
The study of Canadian literature can no longer take place in isolation from larger external forces. Pressures of multiculturalism put emphasis upon discourses of citizenship and security, while market-driven factors increasingly shape the publication, dissemination, and reception of Canadian writing. The persistent questioning of the Humanities has invited a rethinking of the disciplinary and curricular structures within which the literature is taught, while the development of area and diaspora studies has raised important questions about the tradition. The goal of the TransCanada series is to publish forward-thinking critical interventions that investigate these paradigm shifts in interdisciplinary ways.
Series editor:
Smaro Kamboureli, Canada Research Chair in Critical Studies in Canadian Literature, School of English and Theatre Studies and Director, TransCanada Institute, University of Guelph
For more information, please contact:
Smaro Kamboureli
Professor, Canada Research Chair in Critical Studies in Canadian Literature
School of English and Theatre Studies
Director, TransCanada Institute
University of Guelph
50 Stone Road East
Guelph, ON N1G 2W1
Canada
Phone: [phone] ext. 53251
Email: [e-mail]
Lisa Quinn
Acquisitions Editor
Wilfrid Laurier University Press
75 University Avenue West
Waterloo, ON N2L 3C5
Canada
Phone: [phone] ext. 2843
Fax: [phone]
Email: [e-mail]
Producing Canadian Literature
Authors Speak on the Literary Marketplace
Kit Dobson and Smaro Kamboureli
Wilfrid Laurier University Press acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts for our publishing program. We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund for our publishing activities.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Dobson, Kit, 1979-
Producing Canadian literature : authors speak on the literary marketplace / Kit Dobson and Smaro Kamboureli.
(TransCanada series) Includes bibliographical references. Issued also in electronic format. ISBN 978-1-55458-355-3
1. Economics and literature. 2. Authors and publishers-Canada. 3. Canadian literature-Publishing. 4. Booksellers and bookselling-Canada. 5. Government aid to literature-Canada. 6. Authorship. 7. Authors, Canadian-Interviews. I. Kamboureli, Smaro II. Title. III. Series: TransCanada series
PN 151. D 63 2013 070.5 2 C 2012-907186-2

Electronic monograph in multiple formats. Issued also in print format. ISBN 978-1-55458-639-4 ( PDF ).- ISBN 978-1-55458-640-0 ( EPUB )
1. Economics and literature. 2. Authors and publishers-Canada. 3. Canadian literature-Publishing. 4. Booksellers and bookselling-Canada. 5. Government aid to literature-Canada. 6. Authorship. 7. Authors, Canadian-Interviews. I. Kamboureli, Smaro II. Title. III. Series: TransCanada series (Online)
PN 151. D 63 2013 070.5 2 C 2012-907187-0
Cover design and text design by Blakeley Words+Pictures. Front cover image courtesy of LEM ( www.lemproducts.com ).
2013 Wilfrid Laurier University Press Waterloo, Ontario, Canada www.wlupress.wlu.ca
This book is printed on FSC recycled paper and is certified Ecologo. It is made from 100% post-consumer fibre, processed chlorine free, and manufactured using biogas energy.
Printed in Canada
Every reasonable effort has been made to acquire permission for copyright material used in this text, and to acknowledge all such indebtedness accurately. Any errors and omissions called to the publisher s attention will be corrected in future printings.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior written consent of the publisher or a licence from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency (Access Copyright). For an Access Copyright licence, visit http://www.accesscopyright.ca or call toll free to 1-800-893-5777.
Contents
Foreword: Producing a Globalized Canadian Literature and Its Communities
Jeff Derksen
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Kit Dobson
1. Too Bloody-Minded to Give Up : Interview with Christian B k
Kit Dobson
2. The Politics of Our Work : Interview with Ashok Mathur
Smaro Kamboureli and Kit Dobson
3. Change the Way Canada Sees Us : Interview with Lee Maracle
Smaro Kamboureli and Kit Dobson
4. A Very, Very Uncertain Way to Make a Living : Interview with Jane Urquhart
Smaro Kamboureli and Kit Dobson
5. To Hear This Different Story : Interview with Daniel Heath Justice
Smaro Kamboureli and Kit Dobson
6. Crossing Borders with Our Work : Interview with Er n Moure
Smaro Kamboureli and Kit Dobson
7. No Reason to Fool Yourself : Interview with Aritha van Herk
Kit Dobson
8. Literature Survives through Its Variety : Interview with Stephen Henighan
Kit Dobson
9. Under Conditions of Restraint : Interview with Larissa Lai
Smaro Kamboureli and Kit Dobson
10. A Book of Poetry in the Mix : Interview with George Elliott Clarke
Smaro Kamboureli and Kit Dobson
Appendix: Timeline of Canadian Cultural Bodies since the Massey Commission
Bibliography
Index
Foreword Producing a Globalized Canadian Literature and Its Communities
Jeff Derksen
The small modernist library in New Westminster, B.C., opened in the year that I was born. Its architecture, a modest variation on the International Style, and its open floorplan with a mezzanine, reflected the way in which culture was being brought into the Canadian public sphere, and signalled the centrality of print culture within the shaping of a national imagination. Around the centenary of 1967, all of the books produced by Canadian authors, which had previously sat discreetly on the shelves, suddenly grew a red maple leaf on their spine: as their number increased, the library became autumnal with CanLit. I worked my way, from left to right, across the shelves of the library, reading whatever red-leafed book lay in my route, an education drawn from the combination of architectural space and the library s cataloguing system. Sometimes I d be pulled in by a particular author, and my brother and I would take out all of their books and swap them back and forth, coordinating our reading tempo. Sometimes the very strangeness of the language and of the world a book depicted kept me hooked. I still recall the cool prose and the fascinating alienating effect of John Metcalfe s prose, and Alice Munro s short stories-so tied down and domestic in comparison to our working-class lives! Even the rock-hard lives of George Ryga s northern Alberta farmers and desk clerks felt more recognizable, even on the rainy coast. Occasionally, I would stumble on a book that made the local unfamiliar as well, such as George Bowering s Flycatcher Other Storie s-this other world of Bowering s Vancouver was a mere hour away.
Rather than being nostalgic, I now look back at that moment, concretized so nicely in the architecture, not as a period when the contradictions of the state were hidden within a welcoming cultural nationalism, but as a moment when one s relationship to Canadian literature was mediated more by public institutions than by the forces we now rather casually generalize as the market. Decades of strong literary criticism and cultural studies have done a good job of overturning the exclusions and distortions of Canadian life and history that the ordered modernist shelves of my public library contained. Were there any First Nations authors who crossed my reading route? I certainly read about them, but was there anything by them? Did I get a sense of the nearness of Hogan s Alley, the black community s neighbourhood, even as it was being razed? Our collective criticism worked hard to make what was hidden visible, and to challenge the categories that produced such invisibility. So, while we can easily see the shifts in the way we consume literature today-online sales and near-monopoly bookstores are the most obvious-what is perhaps more difficult to perceive is the new set of mediations and possibilities within which Canadian authors produce their work. The subtle or even glaring structures that Canadian authors must negotiate in the conception and production of their work are very different than they were at the apex of the cultural nationalism project, and even very different than they were five years ago.
This collection of interviews with Canadian writers covers a vibrant range of aesthetic approaches and gives us a sense of the literary terrain and the complexities of being a writer in Canada today, and it also brings to light the astonishing set of forces that shape the literature even before it reaches a public. Through these extended conversations Kit Dobson and Smaro Kamboureli not only provide us with a map of the current state of publishing and distribution in Canada, but they also reveal to us how the globalized geography of Canadian literature cuts across some of our steadfastly held notions of a national literature, as well as the ways in which this mediation of the cultural and the economic, globalization and the nation, affects the production of literature at the level of literary form, literary communities, and even authors lives. In fact, these interviews are remarkable in that they give readers and students of Canadian literature a glimpse at the way in which an evolving set of conditions and considerations shapes Canadian literature at the moment of its creation as well as through every aspect of its circulation and recognition.
The history